Oh, I just realized this post is new, and not one of the 8 year old posts I keep coming across and want to participate in.
I don’t think this technique works for me, at all. For several reasons. And reading through the comments section, I feel like other people can’t imagine my failure case (e.g. the people surveying others about whether they do / can do this—“Can you imagine your friend saying this?”)
I’m visually aphantasic, I cannot conjure a visual image at all except in some phases of sleep, or sometimes under extreme tiredness while ‘awake’ (I hypothesize those mental states are closer to sleep than normal waking awareness anyway). This means the ‘visual image’ part falls apart instantly. I can, however consciously control my auditory perceptions with extremely high fidelity.
This means I can easily make a voice in my head say anything in a specific person’s voice, but that can only happen with my conscious input. These voices are purely puppets, or more accurately, just ‘voice filters’ I can put on my ‘internal voice’.
I believe I’ve never ‘heard’ anything other than what actually happened or came directly from (or through) my internal train of thought, with rare exceptions of simple sounds hallucinated when about to fall asleep, so it’s rather hard for me to imagine an internal voice that is not THE internal voice.
That all was the first reason, another one is that I don’t think I can model people accurately enough to do this even consciously, let alone subconsciously. I don’t have a way to tell “what would my mom/dad/Alastor Moody say?”—for fictional characters I can only produce the most stereotypical sound bites associated with them if I don’t make them say anything specifically, for Moody it’s “Constant Vigilance”, for Princess Celestia it’s “I’m so proud of you”, but for Albus Dumbledore or Twilight Sparkle it’s just a thoughtful hum in their voice—I at most have a “How would they say this?” component in my head that lets me reword something I want (them) to say into their speech pattern and voice.
While writing this comment I did a few experiments with the mental ‘voices’ I have. If I force them to produce speech, I hear nonspecific speech. That is, I hear that there are words being spoken, breaks between words and sentences, and so on, but none of the actual words. Sort of like hearing some person you recognize in a crowd, but you can’t make out what they’re saying.
I also reflected on “mental constructs that are not me”—I don’t think I’m able to form these anymore at all. Even the few dreams I have and recall are empty of other characters (even if there are ‘people’). I used to have other characters in dreams in my childhood, but even then it was at best one antagonist + a crowd.
On more self reflection, and reading a bunch of posts in the subagents tag, and looking into tulpas again, I believe I just don’t have the mental architecture for this kind of thing.
I hypothesize that this skill requires thinking of yourself as a personality, but I don’t see myself that way. I see my ‘self’ as my central attention. I don’t believe I have software subagents, I believe I have hardware submodules with some configuration overlays at most. There’s no ‘default personality’. I switch how I interact with people based on context fluidly.
I don’t believe my architecture is flexible enough for this, as I can’t even write fictional characters that are not a version of my mind with masked knowledge and hidden or exaggerated traits (and otherwise with a manipulated context). I don’t argue with people in my head, I don’t do ‘what ifs’ of conversations, I don’t imagine what a person would say in some situation.
I don’t believe I have software subagents, I believe I have hardware submodules with some configuration overlays at most. There’s no ‘default personality’. I switch how I interact with people based on context fluidly.
Interesting—if someone told me only that they have no default personality and that they switch how they interact with people fluidly based on context, I’d assume them to naturally view their mind in terms of subagents. Since “no default personality” sounds to me like “no unitary self, just different subagents that get activated based on the context”.
How do you define the difference between software subagents and hardware submodules?
How do you define the difference between software subagents and hardware submodules?
I (feel like I) have a good understanding of what exactly which major ‘parts’ of my brain are capable of. I know what I can do by language modeling, I know what I can do and when with my visual cortex, auditory cortex, kinesthetic sense, motor cortex, working memory, I know what I can do with my spatial awareness. I can consciously focus on most of these parts and affect their workings, mostly by bringing them into attention. I’m also aware of, but not in direct conscious control of some other parts of the brain which makes me somewhat aware of things such as Ugh Fields. (I don’t have names for all such submodules, only the most obvious ones that seem to match up to things I’ve read.)
These all are completely non-agenty, even if they can somewhat work independently of my central attention. Say, when you’re not focusing on sound, do you view your auditory cortex as a sub-agent when it brings to your attention the fact a loud sound just happened? I don’t. I also don’t see these parts as separate from ‘me’, and I don’t communicate with them in any way except with raw attention.
I should also clarify that despite my description, I don’t mean whatever controls executive function when I say “central attention”. I mean the part of the brain that controls the importance that affects what stays and what’s replaced on the ‘main bus’ that other parts of the brain dump data on.
My interpretation of software subagents is that people can install a (possibly pseudo-)personality that runs in certain parts of the brain, or at least interfaces with them while your central attention is elsewhere. Importantly, it’s able to use various mental resources without it coming to your central attention. This interpretation is likely wrong, as I have no experience with this other than reading people’s posts on the internet, which loses a lot of detail.
Regarding “no default personality” and “no unitary self”. I don’t think that’s the case (unless I misunderstood the term), I do have a self, I see my mind’s central attention as my core self, and the rest of my brain as components that allow me to do things that make up the whole self, the externally visible person that I am. I see some of those components as more important (various long term memory, language; some higher abstraction parts of the visual cortex) or less important (the actual learned personality-like behaviors I assume in various situations, my routines, common knowledge) to preserving the ‘whole’ self and its values.
I believe the most important parts of self-hood happen in the center of attention, things that come to attention have a disproportionate effect on decision making, memory formation, and basically everything else that’s important in the brain.
That again sounds pretty close to how I would have described myself earlier (and would mostly still describe). You didn’t write about your emotional balance but if you’re again like me, it would involve few excited states and fewer conflicted or what’s called negative states and emotions e.g., anger. If so, that would confirm my assumption that getting to such a uniform and stable state requires a certain environment. An environment that has little need for the developing brain and mind to overfit. No forced adaptations to environmental risks like loss of caretakers or life. But also an environment rich in information and worth exploring.
I would like to tag in as a 3rd in this group and say your estimate at my growing environment matches how I would describe it. I have little-to-no interior emotional conflict and explicitly modeling others seems alien to me.
True, I didn’t mention emotional balance since it usually plays little role in my daily life. I used to have issues with managing extreme emotions in early childhood that I solved by both avoidance, and ‘dimming’ them to the point they are mostly manageable. I avoid anger in daily life because it was always unproductive for me in the past, and is incompatible with the social strategies I use nowadays (which I picked because I suck at social ‘tactics’).
The environment you describe matches up well, but not perfectly with the one I grew up in. I guess you can use that as a confirmation.
I can relate very well to Flawed Spiral. Before I looked more into meditation and got a higher resolution awareness of inner processes, I could have written a description like him. For me, it was not so much “no unitary self” as rather a tiny self. I didn’t have much of an inner monologue. And I could easily relate to Paul Graham’s appeal to Keep Your Identity Small. A small self doesn’t mean low complexity. For me, it was a high alignment of inner processes and values as well as a rich and updatable world model.
I personally see an inner monologue as as much of a tool as any other part of my brain. The inner monologue, as a tight coupling of auditory and linguistic processing, is rather helpful for performing some kinds of thought, for extending working memory (the auditory loop is an extremely easy place to store small amounts of nearly arbitrary data in the immediate term, and you can abuse your language processing to store moderate amounts of linguistic data in the short term as long as you’re able to retrace a path of thought through it).
I do find that I don’t have a constantly running narrative of my thoughts and what I’m doing, even if I remember having one in the past. I still use internal monologue to trigger parts of my brain for things like planning, or for enhancing myself in some task as described in the earlier paragraph, but most of the time my inner monologue is inactive.
I do agree with Keep Your Identity Small, I seem to have been doing that, or something very similar, automatically from a certain point in my mid teens. This does have a side effect that I never really feel like part of most groups, which is both good and bad, as it allows me to exit groups or communities easily, and for example, permanently ‘shed’ online identities that I decide I can’t use anymore for whatever reason (like sharing too much info that’s reasonably correlatable to another identity or real life).
I’m curious what kinds of meditation you’ve looked into. My go-to form of meditation is focusing attention on my body, in any position, with or without muscle relaxation or increasing blood flow.
The inner monologue, as a tight coupling of auditory and linguistic processing, is rather helpful for performing some kinds of thought, for extending working memory
Same.
I still use internal monologue to trigger parts of my brain for things like planning
Or for recalling previous conversations or rehearsing speech (though that also falls under extended working memory).
This does have a side effect that I never really feel like part of most groups.
Same here. And that, together with what you wrote earlier (“I don’t think I can model people”), leads to less of a felt connection to other people—in both directions: It makes us harder to model.
It is why I have tried to pick up skills in that direction. The way our mind has developed makes it harder—but I think if we succeed, more fluid.
I’m curious what kinds of meditation you’ve looked into.
Since being a teen, I have done a lot of self-introspection. Meditation looked suspicious to me for a long time. I knew about its benefits though the same is said about religion. I was delighted to find a non-dogmatic introduction on LessWrong though I’m not such which one of the many under the tag meditation it was. Probably one by Kaj. I tried the breathing exercise, and it was effortless. Same with other exercises. I had trouble locating emotions in the body and was skeptical, guessing it being illusory (same trouble Duncan has). I attended a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat two years ago organized by an LWer and billed as non-dogmatic and open to individual needs. It worked out incredibly well. The teacher (Julia Harfensteller) provided a lot of exercises and cues from multiple directions. The resolution of my introspection increased immensely. At the end, I gained access to my emotions—previously, they had been so well-regulated subconsciously as to be almost invisible. In the weeks after, I went thru big parts of The Mind Illuminated (see e.g. here).
Things I did:
Breathing meditation (decompose the sensations of the breath)
Noticing beginnings and ends of thoughts down to pre-thoughts.
Noticing bodily sensations, itches, bodily posture with high resolution.
Noticing and naming emotions and noticing bodily correlates.
Regulating emotions up and down e.g joy.
Tuning brain modules up and down, e.g. awareness of physical space, social space, senses, thoughts.
Fun mental experiments like running two though trains in parallel (or rather interleaved).
Deconstruct consciousness.
When I write decompose or deconstruct, I mean it in a sense that includes an intuition like in math when you can solve equations without thinking because your practice has pushed most of the work into the subconscious (System 1 if you want) and made it automatic, effortless.
Or for recalling previous conversations or rehearsing speech
I overlooked the obvious, yes, I do that too, of course. However, less of the rehearsing speech part, and more of looking for concrete words for concepts in the moment. I do believe I would improve the fluidity of my speech by rehearsing, I’m not sure that kind of practice is aligned with my values.
Most of your meditation description sounds fascinating, it seems mostly like practicing the skill I already have to strengthen the connection between direct sensations and conscious attention. The only parts that I’ve never consciously done before are regulating emotions up, and paying attention in general while in emotional states.
I still find backtracking through thoughts difficult, and am not completely successful. I think the way I practice is not particularly effective, but I would like to improve.
I’m not sure I’d be willing to go to a meditation retreat, I’d have to re-evaluate quite a few things to consider actually going.
a lot of time in one large chunk to improve the mind (introspect, meditate, or something). As with programming some things you can only do if you go deeper and deeper in one run (extreme maker schedule).
tight feedback loops with the teacher and other practitioners hopefully at about the same level.
Both interrelate. But with your specific profile and experience level, I think it will be difficult to find a suitable retreat. It might work better to work closely with a meditation practitioner that you click with.
I hypothesize that this skill requires thinking of yourself as a personality, but I don’t see myself that way. I see my ‘self’ as my central attention. I don’t believe I have software subagents, I believe I have hardware submodules with some configuration overlays at most. There’s no ‘default personality’. I switch how I interact with people based on context fluidly.
This describes my own experience fairly well—except that I am definitely not visually aphantasic. This part is spot-on for me, though:
This means I can easily make a voice in my head say anything in a specific person’s voice, but that can only happen with my conscious input. These voices are purely puppets, or more accurately, just ‘voice filters’ I can put on my ‘internal voice’.
I believe I’ve never ‘heard’ anything other than what actually happened or came directly from (or through) my internal train of thought
Oh, I just realized this post is new, and not one of the 8 year old posts I keep coming across and want to participate in.
I don’t think this technique works for me, at all. For several reasons. And reading through the comments section, I feel like other people can’t imagine my failure case (e.g. the people surveying others about whether they do / can do this—“Can you imagine your friend saying this?”)
I’m visually aphantasic, I cannot conjure a visual image at all except in some phases of sleep, or sometimes under extreme tiredness while ‘awake’ (I hypothesize those mental states are closer to sleep than normal waking awareness anyway). This means the ‘visual image’ part falls apart instantly. I can, however consciously control my auditory perceptions with extremely high fidelity.
This means I can easily make a voice in my head say anything in a specific person’s voice, but that can only happen with my conscious input. These voices are purely puppets, or more accurately, just ‘voice filters’ I can put on my ‘internal voice’.
I believe I’ve never ‘heard’ anything other than what actually happened or came directly from (or through) my internal train of thought, with rare exceptions of simple sounds hallucinated when about to fall asleep, so it’s rather hard for me to imagine an internal voice that is not THE internal voice.
That all was the first reason, another one is that I don’t think I can model people accurately enough to do this even consciously, let alone subconsciously. I don’t have a way to tell “what would my mom/dad/Alastor Moody say?”—for fictional characters I can only produce the most stereotypical sound bites associated with them if I don’t make them say anything specifically, for Moody it’s “Constant Vigilance”, for Princess Celestia it’s “I’m so proud of you”, but for Albus Dumbledore or Twilight Sparkle it’s just a thoughtful hum in their voice—I at most have a “How would they say this?” component in my head that lets me reword something I want (them) to say into their speech pattern and voice.
While writing this comment I did a few experiments with the mental ‘voices’ I have. If I force them to produce speech, I hear nonspecific speech. That is, I hear that there are words being spoken, breaks between words and sentences, and so on, but none of the actual words. Sort of like hearing some person you recognize in a crowd, but you can’t make out what they’re saying.
I also reflected on “mental constructs that are not me”—I don’t think I’m able to form these anymore at all. Even the few dreams I have and recall are empty of other characters (even if there are ‘people’). I used to have other characters in dreams in my childhood, but even then it was at best one antagonist + a crowd.
On more self reflection, and reading a bunch of posts in the subagents tag, and looking into tulpas again, I believe I just don’t have the mental architecture for this kind of thing.
I hypothesize that this skill requires thinking of yourself as a personality, but I don’t see myself that way. I see my ‘self’ as my central attention. I don’t believe I have software subagents, I believe I have hardware submodules with some configuration overlays at most. There’s no ‘default personality’. I switch how I interact with people based on context fluidly.
I don’t believe my architecture is flexible enough for this, as I can’t even write fictional characters that are not a version of my mind with masked knowledge and hidden or exaggerated traits (and otherwise with a manipulated context). I don’t argue with people in my head, I don’t do ‘what ifs’ of conversations, I don’t imagine what a person would say in some situation.
Interesting—if someone told me only that they have no default personality and that they switch how they interact with people fluidly based on context, I’d assume them to naturally view their mind in terms of subagents. Since “no default personality” sounds to me like “no unitary self, just different subagents that get activated based on the context”.
How do you define the difference between software subagents and hardware submodules?
I (feel like I) have a good understanding of what exactly which major ‘parts’ of my brain are capable of. I know what I can do by language modeling, I know what I can do and when with my visual cortex, auditory cortex, kinesthetic sense, motor cortex, working memory, I know what I can do with my spatial awareness. I can consciously focus on most of these parts and affect their workings, mostly by bringing them into attention. I’m also aware of, but not in direct conscious control of some other parts of the brain which makes me somewhat aware of things such as Ugh Fields. (I don’t have names for all such submodules, only the most obvious ones that seem to match up to things I’ve read.)
These all are completely non-agenty, even if they can somewhat work independently of my central attention. Say, when you’re not focusing on sound, do you view your auditory cortex as a sub-agent when it brings to your attention the fact a loud sound just happened? I don’t. I also don’t see these parts as separate from ‘me’, and I don’t communicate with them in any way except with raw attention.
I should also clarify that despite my description, I don’t mean whatever controls executive function when I say “central attention”. I mean the part of the brain that controls the importance that affects what stays and what’s replaced on the ‘main bus’ that other parts of the brain dump data on.
My interpretation of software subagents is that people can install a (possibly pseudo-)personality that runs in certain parts of the brain, or at least interfaces with them while your central attention is elsewhere. Importantly, it’s able to use various mental resources without it coming to your central attention. This interpretation is likely wrong, as I have no experience with this other than reading people’s posts on the internet, which loses a lot of detail.
Regarding “no default personality” and “no unitary self”. I don’t think that’s the case (unless I misunderstood the term), I do have a self, I see my mind’s central attention as my core self, and the rest of my brain as components that allow me to do things that make up the whole self, the externally visible person that I am. I see some of those components as more important (various long term memory, language; some higher abstraction parts of the visual cortex) or less important (the actual learned personality-like behaviors I assume in various situations, my routines, common knowledge) to preserving the ‘whole’ self and its values.
I believe the most important parts of self-hood happen in the center of attention, things that come to attention have a disproportionate effect on decision making, memory formation, and basically everything else that’s important in the brain.
That again sounds pretty close to how I would have described myself earlier (and would mostly still describe). You didn’t write about your emotional balance but if you’re again like me, it would involve few excited states and fewer conflicted or what’s called negative states and emotions e.g., anger. If so, that would confirm my assumption that getting to such a uniform and stable state requires a certain environment. An environment that has little need for the developing brain and mind to overfit. No forced adaptations to environmental risks like loss of caretakers or life. But also an environment rich in information and worth exploring.
I would like to tag in as a 3rd in this group and say your estimate at my growing environment matches how I would describe it. I have little-to-no interior emotional conflict and explicitly modeling others seems alien to me.
[Edit s/know/no]
True, I didn’t mention emotional balance since it usually plays little role in my daily life. I used to have issues with managing extreme emotions in early childhood that I solved by both avoidance, and ‘dimming’ them to the point they are mostly manageable. I avoid anger in daily life because it was always unproductive for me in the past, and is incompatible with the social strategies I use nowadays (which I picked because I suck at social ‘tactics’).
The environment you describe matches up well, but not perfectly with the one I grew up in. I guess you can use that as a confirmation.
Thanks for sharing. I can relate even to the exceptions and resulting strategies.
I can relate very well to Flawed Spiral. Before I looked more into meditation and got a higher resolution awareness of inner processes, I could have written a description like him. For me, it was not so much “no unitary self” as rather a tiny self. I didn’t have much of an inner monologue. And I could easily relate to Paul Graham’s appeal to Keep Your Identity Small. A small self doesn’t mean low complexity. For me, it was a high alignment of inner processes and values as well as a rich and updatable world model.
I personally see an inner monologue as as much of a tool as any other part of my brain. The inner monologue, as a tight coupling of auditory and linguistic processing, is rather helpful for performing some kinds of thought, for extending working memory (the auditory loop is an extremely easy place to store small amounts of nearly arbitrary data in the immediate term, and you can abuse your language processing to store moderate amounts of linguistic data in the short term as long as you’re able to retrace a path of thought through it).
I do find that I don’t have a constantly running narrative of my thoughts and what I’m doing, even if I remember having one in the past. I still use internal monologue to trigger parts of my brain for things like planning, or for enhancing myself in some task as described in the earlier paragraph, but most of the time my inner monologue is inactive.
I do agree with Keep Your Identity Small, I seem to have been doing that, or something very similar, automatically from a certain point in my mid teens. This does have a side effect that I never really feel like part of most groups, which is both good and bad, as it allows me to exit groups or communities easily, and for example, permanently ‘shed’ online identities that I decide I can’t use anymore for whatever reason (like sharing too much info that’s reasonably correlatable to another identity or real life).
I’m curious what kinds of meditation you’ve looked into. My go-to form of meditation is focusing attention on my body, in any position, with or without muscle relaxation or increasing blood flow.
Same.
Or for recalling previous conversations or rehearsing speech (though that also falls under extended working memory).
Same here. And that, together with what you wrote earlier (“I don’t think I can model people”), leads to less of a felt connection to other people—in both directions: It makes us harder to model.
It is why I have tried to pick up skills in that direction. The way our mind has developed makes it harder—but I think if we succeed, more fluid.
Since being a teen, I have done a lot of self-introspection. Meditation looked suspicious to me for a long time. I knew about its benefits though the same is said about religion. I was delighted to find a non-dogmatic introduction on LessWrong though I’m not such which one of the many under the tag meditation it was. Probably one by Kaj. I tried the breathing exercise, and it was effortless. Same with other exercises. I had trouble locating emotions in the body and was skeptical, guessing it being illusory (same trouble Duncan has). I attended a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat two years ago organized by an LWer and billed as non-dogmatic and open to individual needs. It worked out incredibly well. The teacher (Julia Harfensteller) provided a lot of exercises and cues from multiple directions. The resolution of my introspection increased immensely. At the end, I gained access to my emotions—previously, they had been so well-regulated subconsciously as to be almost invisible. In the weeks after, I went thru big parts of The Mind Illuminated (see e.g. here).
Things I did:
Breathing meditation (decompose the sensations of the breath)
Decomposing visual perception (‘unseeing’ shapes, forms, motions, faces)
Noticing beginnings and ends of thoughts down to pre-thoughts.
Noticing bodily sensations, itches, bodily posture with high resolution.
Noticing and naming emotions and noticing bodily correlates.
Regulating emotions up and down e.g joy.
Tuning brain modules up and down, e.g. awareness of physical space, social space, senses, thoughts.
Fun mental experiments like running two though trains in parallel (or rather interleaved).
Deconstruct consciousness.
When I write decompose or deconstruct, I mean it in a sense that includes an intuition like in math when you can solve equations without thinking because your practice has pushed most of the work into the subconscious (System 1 if you want) and made it automatic, effortless.
I overlooked the obvious, yes, I do that too, of course. However, less of the rehearsing speech part, and more of looking for concrete words for concepts in the moment. I do believe I would improve the fluidity of my speech by rehearsing, I’m not sure that kind of practice is aligned with my values.
Most of your meditation description sounds fascinating, it seems mostly like practicing the skill I already have to strengthen the connection between direct sensations and conscious attention. The only parts that I’ve never consciously done before are regulating emotions up, and paying attention in general while in emotional states.
I still find backtracking through thoughts difficult, and am not completely successful. I think the way I practice is not particularly effective, but I would like to improve.
I’m not sure I’d be willing to go to a meditation retreat, I’d have to re-evaluate quite a few things to consider actually going.
I think the two big advantages of a retreat are
a lot of time in one large chunk to improve the mind (introspect, meditate, or something). As with programming some things you can only do if you go deeper and deeper in one run (extreme maker schedule).
tight feedback loops with the teacher and other practitioners hopefully at about the same level.
Both interrelate. But with your specific profile and experience level, I think it will be difficult to find a suitable retreat. It might work better to work closely with a meditation practitioner that you click with.
This also describes my experience.
FWIW, my experience of writing fiction is very much “they are versions of me with masked knowledge and hidden or exaggerated traits.”
This describes my own experience fairly well—except that I am definitely not visually aphantasic. This part is spot-on for me, though: